Lucy: A Biography–Part IX

Finally after ten years, I am close to publishing the heart-rending and fast-paced biography of Lucy. Written in the spirit of Jean Auel, this is the paleo-historic saga of our earliest ancestors as lived through the eyes of a female Homo habilis.

Lucy's story of survival

Since Donald Johanson uncovered the tiny three-and-a-half foot clawless, flat-toothed Australopithecine, we have asked, Who is she? And how could she survive in a world of mammoth predators and unrelenting natural disasters she had no understanding about? This book answers those questions as well as more fundamental ones like, Where did God come from? Why did man create his first tool? How did culture start?

Here’s a summary:

Lucy: A Biography follows three species of early man (Australopithecus, Homo habilis and Homo erectus), as they fight for the limited resources of Pleistocene Africa. Lucy, of the species habilis, blames herself for the death of her family and agrees to mate with a stranger (Raza). As they journey to Raza’s homebase, they are tracked by two deadly predators: Xha, of the smarter and more powerful species Homo erectus, and the violent and unforgiving Nature, a sentient being who meddles with fate and Lucy’s future as though it were a chemistry experiment. The story is carefully researched to shared the geography, climate, and biosphere that would have been Lucy’s world 1.8 million years ago, when man was not King and nature ruled with a violence and dispassion we call ‘disaster’ today.

Every week, I’ll post part of this story.

A note: While I took Lucy’s name from the infamous Australopithecine skeleton discovered by Donald Johanson, Lucy is a Homo habilis. Her adopted child Boa is an Australopithecine.

Here’s Part 9:

Lucy: A Biography–Part VII

Finally after ten years, I am close to publishing the heart-rending and fast-paced biography of Lucy. Written in the spirit of Jean Auel, this is the paleo-historic  saga of our earliest ancestors as lived through the eyes of a female Homo habilis. Since Donald Johanson uncovered the tiny three-and-a-half foot clawless, flat-toothed Australopithecine, we have asked, Who is she? And how could she survive in a world of mammoth predators and unrelenting natural disasters she had no understanding about? This book answers those questions as well as more fundamental ones like, Where did God come from? Why did man create his first tool? How did culture start?

Here’s a summary:

Lucy: A Biography follows three species of early man (Australopithecus, Homo habilis and Homo erectus), as they fight for the limited resources of Pleistocene Africa. Lucy, of the species habilis, blames herself for the death of her family and agrees to mate with a stranger (Raza). As they journey to Raza’s homebase, they are tracked by two deadly predators: Xha, of the smarter and more powerful species Homo erectus, and the violent and unforgiving Nature, a sentient being who meddles with fate and Lucy’s future as though it were a chemistry experiment. The story is carefully researched to shared the geography, climate, and biosphere that would have been Lucy’s world 1.8 million years ago, when man was not King and nature ruled with a violence and dispassion we call ‘disaster’ today. 

Every week, I’ll post part of this story.

A note: While I took Lucy’s name from the infamous Australopithecus skeleton discovered by Donald Johanson, Lucy is a Homo habilis. Her adopted child Boa is an Australopithecine.

Here’s Part 7:

Chapter  3–Part 1

Changes

When it is darkest, men see the stars.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“She is strong.” Wisps of their words floated back to Lucy. They never asked if she was tired. Why would they? If she needed rest, she would stop, and they would stop.

But Lucy worried about Baad. Sun had traveled a hand’s length further up the invisible-mountain-in-the-sky. They must be far beyond whatever danger worried Raza, and still he sprinted. Every time Baad passed her to talk with Raza, she smelled his trail of sweat and exhaustion and fear, but he never fell behind and never forced the younger male to slow.    

A herd of Hipparion, elegant heads high, mirrored their path until they veered off, toward a water pocket formed where the river they followed jogged around a copse of aspen trees. Their chests heaved and sweat glistened on their lustrous coats as they slowed and stopped.

This must be the area watering hole. There, a Chalicothere, with its combination of rhinoceros body and equine head, tore vegetation from the branches of an acacia with its clawed toes and stuffed it into its wide mouth. A few steps away, a short necked paleo-hartebeest, its palmate horns more antelope than giraffe, splayed its squatty legs to reach the cool water.

“Crocodylus.” Lucy stared at a smooth stretch of water, where only bulging eyes hinted at the reptile below. Once, when she was a child, Crocodylus had grabbed a child of her group, thrashed his hapless body through the water before diving and carrying him into the murky black depths. All that remained had been a trail of pink and white bubbles. Raza pointed out the distinctive claw marks bisected by the sweeping tail, showed its entry into the water.

And raced onward. Why he wouldn’t stop here, where shade and water were offered, was a mystery to Lucy, but she didn’t ask, simply snagged handfuls of succulents for hydration and stuffed them into her neck sack to eat later.

She’d made this carry sack from Hipparion’s stomach, swished it through water to remove the ungulate’s last meal and rubbed it with pond mud to tamp down the scent that attracted Snarling-dog. Then, she had strung a white tendon, separated from the fibrous sinew that connected Gazelle’s leg to hip, through the top and around her neck. It had confused Raza at first, but after he watched her store travel food and her cutting tool, leaving her hands free, he now expected her to carry as much as both he and Baad combined.

The trio jogged onward in the windless air and the baking Sun, past sag ponds plopped amidst crenulated plateaus, and through debris collected at the base of volcanic hills. They dodged boulders and bounded over outthrow scattered incongruously across the flatlands. A gale came out of nowhere, kicking up a thick billowing cloud of sand and debris and almost knocking Lucy off her feet. She barked to Raza, but the wind carried her words away. She searched franticly for shelter. On one side of their traveling trail was the endless expanse of grasslands. When she turned the opposite direction, hoping to find a baobab or boulder or even a patch of scrub to huddle under, she found a towering wall of dust and dirt spiraling toward her.

She gasped and froze. This monstrous behemoth stood taller than the trees of her homeland and extended as far as her eye could see along the horizon. It roared like mammoth thundering across the plains, and billowed like Smoking Mountain when it spit fire and smoke.

Where did that come from? It licked at Sun’s base one moment and then without warning, turned light into dark like the blackest of the clouds that brought rain on a sunny day. Ahead, she could just make out Raza as he stopped. She tried to go forward to him, but the tempest blew her back, and then the wall of brown fog was upon her. It was all she could do to hold her balance as its swirling force beat at her from all directions. She dropped her head, coughing and spitting grit and then cupped her hands over her mouth. That seemed to work better, so she panted shallow breaths while the storm raged around her. All she could hear was the beating of great wings on all sides, mixed with the taste of dust and dirt and her own fear.

When she forced her head up, she could no longer see Raza or Baad through the murky soot. She shouted, but the storm was so loud, her voice blew back into her face. Grit and sand stung her face and made her slit her eyes, grating in her teeth and leaving its scent in her nostrils. A tree branch caught in the tempest slashed by within a hand’s width of Lucy’s head. She screamed and suddenly Raza had her hand. He motioned to his side and there stood Baad, buffeted by the winds but stumbling forward. If they could get to a tree, they could huddle around its trunk until the windstorm abated. Heads down, they pushed forward. Lucy walked blind. It was better than the stabbing pain of sand against her eyes.

A rabbit slammed into her side as it tumbled through the raging storm. She lost her balance and collapsed onto the gritty ground. Both males followed, and there they huddled in a tight mass, too tired to rise. They tucked their heads as mammoth did during a rainstorm as wave after wave of debris washed over them. At least here, she could breathe.

The dust storm passed as quickly as it started, in a rolling wall of dust and dirt, leaving them coughing and tearing. Dust hung like a fog, blocking all but feeble rays from Sun. Raza tugged them sideways, toward a lone boulder. Baad fell into a deep sleep while Raza walked to the bluff of a nearby berm and sat. Darkness settled around him until he became just a dark-grey shape among the spindled trees limned against Night Sun’s horizon.

Unable to still her mind, Lucy glanced toward Night Sun. It had already lost the shape of her tight fist. Now, it curved as though her stone chopper had sliced a piece from its edge. Lucy wondered who did that, time after time. Sometimes, it disappeared completely. Tonight, it had lost a finger-width of the size it started with when they set out. She hoped Night Sun would visit her new home.

She studied the sparkles of light filling the dark void around Night Sun. There were so many, like the grains of sand sprinkled over the barren ground. Garv had taught her how to read their trails as she read animal trails. They

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migrated from side to side across the sky as the rains came and went. By watching their steps, she could tell how far she had traveled.

She found a group of the brightest specks that crossed each other as her arms did to indicate danger. Despite the full day of travel, they hadn’t moved far. When the days became dryer, they disappeared entirely, reappearing with the rains when the animals grew fat with babies.

She had once thought the tiny lights were flames burning the blackness, but they never got larger than the seed from a wildflower, nor did they burn themselves out like the grass fires. Garv had told her they were openings into another land.

The memories returned. That was the day Garv had beat on a bee hive until the insects burst out and followed his bellowing form. With the hive empty, Lucy had stuck her arms in up to her elbows and scooped big handfuls of honey onto a leaf. That done, she’d shouted to Garv as she scrambled up into the forest canopy. When he arrived, they sucked and chewed the leaf sponges she’d created until they finished every bit.

Then they’d sat, satiated, surrounded by layer upon layer of verdure. He had tilted her head upward until she gazed at the rich green leaves, so close she could touch them. They barely covered the next layer of darker shaded blades and buds, which in turn shrouded the plants above them, and so on. She followed the limbs and their lush growth upward until the canopy blurred into a black-green haziness so thick that only the rare shaft of light broke through the gloom, appearing as a bright light bounded by the darkness of the jungle.

“Maybe night is like this. Maybe the bright white holes are small because we are far away, as we are from the forest’s roof,” Garv breathed to her across the boundaries of time.

“That would make sense, Garv,” Lucy whispered silently.

She relaxed with the familiarity of the conversation and then rubbed her breasts and stomach with the juice from the same root bundle she’d shared with Baad, wondering what she had done that made them ache and swell.

She still couldn’t sleep. She would construct a bag for Raza—not as sturdy as one made from a stomach or bladder, but useful. She extracted a large leaf from her neck sack, smoothed it and perforated the top with her cutting tool, creating large holes spaced along the leaf’s veins. Then she selected a tendon from the collection around her neck. This one from the leg of Hipparion was long enough to encircle Raza’s thick neck and shoulders. She separated a shred as she would a section of stringy grass shoot, softened it by running it quickly from hand to hand, and strung it through the holes she’d made in the blade.

 

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He and Raza are taking Lucy to her new home, their band across the Great Rift

Lucy leaves her homeland and any hope of finding Garv, her intended Pair-mate

Lucy, young, strong, and pregnant

Driven by forces he doesn’t understand to find Lucy and take her home with him

Part VIII next week…

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Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-fifth grade and author of two technology training books for middle school. She wrote Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman. She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a tech columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for ISTE’s Journal for Computing Teachers, IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s editing a thriller for her agent that should be be out to publishers this summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

Lucy: A Biography–Part VI

Finally after ten years, I am close to publishing the heart-rending and fast-paced biography of Lucy. Written in the spirit of Jean Auel, this is the paleo-historic  saga of our earliest ancestors as lived through the eyes of a female Homo habilis. Since Donald Johanson uncovered the tiny three-and-a-half foot clawless, flat-toothed Australopithecine, we have asked, Who is she? And how could she survive in a world of mammoth predators and unrelenting natural disasters she had no understanding about? This book answers those questions as well as more fundamental ones like, Where did God come from? Why did man create his first tool? How did culture start?

Here’s a summary:

Lucy: A Biography follows three species of early man (Australopithecus, Homo habilis and Homo erectus), as they fight for the limited resources of Pleistocene Africa. Lucy, of the species habilis, blames herself for the death of her family and agrees to mate with a stranger (Raza). As they journey to Raza’s homebase, they are tracked by two deadly predators: Xha, of the smarter and more powerful species Homo erectus, and the violent and unforgiving Nature, a sentient being who meddles with fate and Lucy’s future as though it were a chemistry experiment. The story is carefully researched to shared the geography, climate, and biosphere that would have been Lucy’s world 1.8 million years ago, when man was not King and nature ruled with a violence and dispassion we call ‘disaster’ today. 

Every week, I’ll post part of this story.

A note: While I took Lucy’s name from the infamous Australopithecine skeleton discovered by Donald Johanson, Lucy is a Homo habilis. Her adopted child Boa is an Australopithecine.

Here’s Part 6:

Chapter 2

Homo habilis Emigrates to the Savanna…

 

Suitably clothed and with a cap to obscure his low forehead and

beetle brow, he would probably go unnoticed in a crowd today.

—Mary Leakey, regarding Homo habilis

 Lucy threw a last look at her beleaguered past. Feq’s refusal to blame her as she said goodbye only made her guilt worse. Her life had been snatched like Rabbit from its hole, the dreams shattered like the crunch of the hare’s neck. She felt as worn as the landscape. One step forward, and then another. She could do that, but nothing more.

None of them had spoken since coating themselves in mud and dung and leaving Feq. She moved like a shadow, timing her footfalls with Raza’s to mask the sound of her passage along the narrow path, hemmed in by thick-trunked trees to the side and layers of canopy overhead. Only once, when a spotted snake slithered across her traveling trail, did Lucy hesitate. Raza grunted and Baad grumbled as her out-of-sync thud reverberated from canopy to forest floor. Even Cousin Chimp screeched a sharp cry of warning.

Finally they broke free of the forest and entered a meadow laced with the scent of flowering herbs and grazing deer. They flew through the waist-high grasses, past trees laden with fruit that had quenched her thirst on hot days and around the termite mound where Cheetah slept, and she gorged on squirming white insects when Cheetah left to hunt.

I haven’t been back here since that day…

Lucy: A Biography–Part III

Who was Lucy?

Finally after ten years, I am close to publishing the heart-rending and fast-paced biography of Lucy. Written in the spirit of Jean Auel, this is the paleo-historic  saga of our earliest ancestors as lived through the eyes of a female Homo habilis. Since Donald Johanson uncovered the tiny three-and-a-half foot clawless, flat-toothed Australopithecine, we have asked, Who is she? And how could she survive in a world of mammoth predators and unrelenting natural disasters she had no understanding about? This book answers those questions as well as more fundamental ones like, Where did God come from? Why did man create his first tool? How did culture start?

Here’s a summary:

Lucy: A Biography follows three species of early man (Australopithecus, Homo habilis and Homo erectus), as they fight for the limited resources of Pleistocene Africa. Lucy, of the species habilis, blames herself for the death of her family and agrees to mate with a stranger (Raza). As they journey to Raza’s homebase, they are tracked by two deadly predators: Xha, of the smarter and more powerful species Homo erectus, and the violent and unforgiving Nature, a sentient being who meddles with fate and Lucy’s future as though it were a chemistry experiment. The story is carefully researched to shared the geography, climate, and biosphere that would have been Lucy’s world 1.8 million years ago, when man was not King and nature ruled with a violence and dispassion we call ‘disaster’ today. 

Every week, I’ll post part of this story.

Here’s Part 3 (A note: While I took Lucy’s name from the infamous Australopithecine skeleton discovered by Donald Johanson, Lucy is a Homo habilis. Her adopted child Boa is an Australopithecine):

Prologue

In the Beginning… 

…it is difficult to avoid personifying the word Nature; but I mean by Nature, only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us.

—Charles Darwin 

 Billions of years whooshed by in such a rush, it made Sun dizzy. Planetary systems formed and life evolved and still Sun couldn’t decide. This Machiavellian monstrosity who called herself ‘Nature’ cared nothing for Earth. She collided vast landmasses with such brutality that the ground buckled into crenulated piles of lofty mountains and deep valleys, or splintered into ragged continents that floated away on infinite oceans. Molten hotspots blew liquid rock through the fragile crust and splattered volcanic archipelagos like multi-layered onions. The erratic climate melted glaciers and rainforests with equal ease.

Sun sighed. Nature’s life forms were no better. They came and went, crushed by Earth’s ever-changing habitat. The survivors, like the desultory horsetail ferns or the annoying chirruping insects, were boring. The first had no flexibility and the second, no mental strength. Sun turned her attention to other planets in her system, until the day a muscular, slope-shouldered hominid named Orrorin appeared. Though his head was no larger than what Nature called a ‘chimpanzee’, a human soul radiated through his eyes. Who was he? He fingered his food as though wondering at its texture. Hostility intrigued rather than frightened him. Had Nature finally done something spectacular?

Lucy: A Biography–Part I

Who was Lucy?

Finally after ten years, I am close to publishing the heart-rending and fast-paced biography of Lucy. Written in the spirit of Jean Auel, this is the paleo-historic  saga of our earliest ancestors as lived through the eyes of a female Homo habilis. Since Donald Johanson uncovered the tiny three-and-a-half foot clawless, flat-toothed Australopithecine, we have asked, Who is she? And how could she survive in a world of mammoth predators and unrelenting natural disasters she had no understanding about? This book answers those questions as well as more fundamental ones like Where did God come from? Why did man create his first tool? How did culture start? Here’s a summary:

Lucy: A Biography follows three species of early man (Australopithecus, Homo habilis and Homo erectus), as they fight over the limited resources of Plio-Pleistocene Africa. Lucy, of the species habilis, blames herself  when her family is trampled by an enraged herd of mammoth and agrees to mate with a stranger (Raza). As they journey to Raza’s homebase, two deadly predators track them: Xha, of the smarter and more powerful species Homo erectus, and the violent and unforgiving Nature, a sentient spirit who meddles with fate and Lucy’s future as though a chemistry experiment. The geography, biosphere and climate are carefully researched to represent what Lucy would have faced in a world 1.8 million years ago, when man was not King and nature ruled with a violence and dispassion unimaginable today. 

Every week, I’ll post part of this story. Here’s Part 1 of the Preface:

PREFACE

“Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is

fragmentary and open to various interpretations.”

Henry Gee, Nature 2001

Like a favonian breeze, life arrived on Planet Earth about 3.5 billion years ago. Our story begins much later, a brief two million years before present, during the waning days of the Pliocene Epoch, itself part of the 65-million-year-long Cenozoic Era. The primordial continent of Gondwana has splintered into chunks and warm-blooded, furry mammals have replaced the dinosaurs. The climate is cooling and the growing glaciers have locked billions of gallons of Earth’s water into icy prisons. South America has moved to its present position contiguous to North America and the land bridge connecting Asia with Alaska still exists.

If you telescope in, you’ll see we are in Africa.

Book Review: Singing Neanderthals

The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body

by Steven Mithen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have avoided this book in the past because my personal interest extends to an earlier time than Neanderthals, but I shouldn’t have. The title is misleading in that he extends to man’s earliest Homo habilis days, not those relatively-modern Homo neanderthalensis times. He explains the importance of music to man’s ability to use symbols, to express ideas without the vast lexicon we currently possess. He shares his definition of music as ‘human sound communication outside the scope of language’ (borrowed from Bruno Nettl) and describes a believable scenario for the co-evolution of music and language. All in all, a well thought-out book with lots of factually-based opinions.

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Book Review: The Unfolding of Language

The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention

by Guy Deutscher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Dr. Deutscher has done a scholarly, thorough discussion on the roots of language, but I believe he started too late in time. I’m of the persuasion that language involves more than the spoken word. I find body language (which proponents argue communicate half of what we speak), facial expressions (think FACS, FBI, microexpressions), movement to be as telling of a person’s intentions as words. Sometimes more so.

Understanding Early Man

Some twenty years ago, I began a quest to understand man. Why are we the way we are? Can we be a kind and caring species that voluntarily takes care of our brother without asking for

What changed us?

anything in exchange, or is that contrary to our nature, to survival? Were those traits bread in to us so we as the small creature on the savanna without thick skin, without claws and tearing fangs, without the speed of a leopard, could work as a group to out-size, out-muscle the predators that controlled our environ? Did it require the violence that has dogged our existence since modern man emerged, our seemed inability to be kind just for the sake of kindness?

I have no answers, but my curiosity drives me to study our earliest ancestors, starting with the first creatures we considered to be predecessor–Australopithecines. To date, I’ve reached Homo erectus. Along the way, I’ve read a slew of wonderful books by brilliant scientists:

• Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey (actually, all of Johanson’s books)
• The Origin of Humankind by Richard Leakey (and all of all of the Leakeys’ books)
• Java Man: How Two Geologists Changed Our Understanding of Human Evolution by Carl Swisher III, Garniss Curtis and Roger Lewin
• Dragon Bone Hill: An Ice-age Saga of Homo erectus by Noel T. Boaz and Russell Ciochon
• Evolution of Homo erectus by G. Philip Rightmire
• Meeting Pre-historic Man by G.H.R. von Koenigswald
• Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form by Michael Sims
• The Acheulian Site of Gesher Beno Ya-aqov by Naama Goren-Inbar et al

Pan Paniscus or Homo Paniscus–You Decide

Kanzi’s language comprehension has been demonstrated in research using novel sentences — phrases that preclude the learning of specific responses. Visit www.greatapetrust.org to learn more about Kanzi and the other great apes at Great Ape Trust.

How Man Communicated Before He Had Words

There is much debate over when early man began to speak–with words, that is. Paleoanthropologists discuss the development of the brain and the throat–when was it evolved enough to support the formation of words and the thought that goes into syntax.

Me, I think when man was clever enough to live in groups, he had to come up with a way to communicate with each other. This isn’t a leap. Chimpanzees do it, pretty much communicating all of their basic needs. The difference is, we presume Man the Thinker must have had deep thoughts, plans, ideas, symbolic representations for his world. This, we will never know. What we do know is that there was no reason that Early Man couldn’t communicate to his group about what was important to his life. As more became important, I’m sure language adapted.

Here’s a primer, from chimpanzees:

The Importance of Running to Man

Man seems an unlikely survivor of the primal world. We don’t have claws like Dinofelis, deadly teeth like Sabertooth, thick skin like early rhinos, or the huge size of a mammoth. How did we escape becoming the favorite snack to all these better-equipped predators?

One way is we learned to run. Not the sprint of a gazelle who can take off and flee at an outrageous pace. Like her, many Pliocene animals relied on quickness and speed to escape predators or catch prey. Few had resources beyond that initial sprint.

We weren’t as swift as our four-legged competitors, but when the gazelle quickly tired and had to stop to regenerate, we kept running. In fact, even then, we could run great distances which enabled us to chase down prey when they tired and overheated.

Top Ten Questions About Early Man

My colleague, amazingfacts, put together an intriguing list of our questions about the species, Homo sapiens sapiens, from how we became what we see today as ‘modern man’ to where will we eventually end up when our 2 million years of evolutionary history (that being the average life span of a species on the planet Earth) expires. Enjoy.

Did Environmental Change Cause Human Evolution?

After reading this scholarly research on human evolution, I came to believe the authors’ hypothesis: Environmental change caused human change. See if you agree:

Evolution on a Restless Planet: Were Environmental Variability and Environmental Change Major Drivers of Human Evolution?
Peter J. Richerson, Robert L. Bettinger, and Robert Boyd
7.1

The Brilliance of Man’s Mind

If there’s one skill man excels at–beyond every other living creature–it’s problem solving. Nothing stops us from coming up with solutions. No economic system. No political repression. No prison. No paucity of education or any other factor considered critical to thinking. Man transcends any and all mental shackles as though he can’t stop himself. Like an addiction to thinking. A passion for the cerebral. A primal need.

My theory: Man’s big brain is the result not of tool making or upright stature, but our penchant for thinking. Because, like any muscle in the body, the more we have used our brains, the more they grow, and since the days of Homo habilis–or even Australopithecines–we have used our brains to invent tools, to plan, to communicate. Look at other mammals. When they’re not searching for food, they’re resting or sleeping. Not early man. When he finished hunting, he created tools, gathered food to feed infants and nursing mothers, planned hunts, figured out defenses from predators. All that thinking grew our brain.

Today, two million years into the genus Homo‘s arrival, we have another example of our dauntingly brilliant brain. Read on.

Nobel Prize for chemistry goes to Israeli, 2 Americans

by Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

Unraveling the machinery that generates proteins within cells, a discovery that offered new avenues to antibiotics, has earned two Americans and an Israeli the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, 57, of the United Kingdom’s MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology; Thomas Steitz, 69, of Yale; and Israel’s Ada Yonath, 70, of the Weizmann Institute of Science will share the $1.4 million prize equally. Working separately, the trio cracked the chemistry of the “ribosome” inside every cell and showed “how the DNA code is translated into life,” Gunnar Öquist of the Royal Swedish Academy said at Wednesday’s announcement.

NOBEL IN PHYSICS: 3 Americans win

MEDICINE: 3 Americans win; see exclusive video

“It seemed a bit like climbing Mount Everest. We knew it was doable, in theory. But we didn’t know how to get there,” Steitz said. “When we got it, it was the most exhilarating moment I’ve had in science.”

“Everyone recognized this was on the short list for the prize,” said Jeremy Berg, director of the federal National Institute of General Medical Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health that funded all three winners for parts of their research. “We’re terribly pleased but not terribly surprised.”

Inside cells, thousands of ribosomes hook up with messenger RNA molecules carrying bits of genetic code. The codes tell ribosomes to spit out proteins, the building blocks of blood, bone, brain and every other tissue. How these machines work had been a mystery without knowing the structure of the ribosome itself.

In 1980, Yonath first reported X-rays of crystallized ribosomes taken from microbes that thrive at high-temperature in the Dead Sea. The images began to reveal the shape of the ribosome. She later showed that freezing crystallized ribosomes also could lead to better X-rays of their structure.

Steitz and Ramakrishnan, a U.S. citizen, tackled higher-resolution X-rays of the small and large halves of the ribosomes, respectively. All three winners produced definitive images of the ribosome’s structure in 2000.

“Proteins are workhorses of the cell. Almost no other process is so fundamental,” Berg said.

Steitz noted the ribosome work led to designs for antibiotics to combat infections such as drug-resistant staph. It also helped researchers understand the evolution of life, where at its core, the ribosome is built of RNA, not proteins, answering questions about how early life produced its own building blocks. An “RNA world” likely existed before microbes moved on to producing DNA and proteins billions of years ago, he suggested.

“Life is chemistry, and I think the award is well-deserved,” said Thomas Lane of the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C. Yonath is the first woman to win the chemistry Nobel since 1964, he noted, although half of U.S. chemistry degrees now go to women. “I think we’ll see more.”

How Homo Erectus Made His Tools

Ever wonder how those scrawny protohumans without claws, sharp teeth or thick skin survived the likes of Sabertooth? Me too, so I researched it and ended up with a dashing tale, full of suspense, drama, and the appealing characters that we moderns can relate to. What didn’t kill them made them stronger, and isn’t that what Darwin predicted when he labeled evolution ‘survival of the fittest’?

Early man, especially by 1.6 million years ago when Homo erectus first arrived on the planet, learned that they couldn’t survive without weapons to balance the odds. Prior to H. erectus, it was a simple primitive rock, sharpened at one end for cutting and chopping. By the time of  Erect Man, he used stone tools to break, crush, split and cut up difficult vegetable and animal foods. His tools replaced his flimsy fingernails, his small dull teeth, and allowed him to cut through thick animal skins. They took the place of the Sabertooth’s powerful jaws and enabled Man to crush long bones and extract the nutritious marrow.

We know something more about Homo erectus from the stone tools–the handaxes, picks, scrapers, awls and cleavers–he left behind: He was highly intelligent. Not only did it require good eye-hand coordination and a precision grip to strike core with hammer stone and create these tools, but their three-dimensional symmetry reflects a Euclidean sense of space and an ability to follow a plan over a prolonged period of time to create the beautiful, well-knapped handaxes they created by the thousands.

The How and Why of Early Man

So many questions about our past are debated because of the lack of  written records. Before man put proverbial pen to paper, we had only bones and teeth, soil contents, paleo-geology and -geography and -climate, to intuit what might have been.

This, despite the fact that we know for a fact that written records are always from the writer’s perspective. They are only trustworthy to the point we trust the writer–like a Leakey, Donald Johansson, Chris Beard, Jane Goodall. These interpretations–albeit highly trained–of primary sources (Earth’s record) are given more credibility than the primary source itself (an action I’m sure discouraged by Leakey’s and Johnasson’s and Beard’s and Goodall’s teachers as they pursued their research). Why? The reason is simple: It takes a PhD to interpret Earth’s story.

Early Man and Tool Use

I’ve added a story Otto shared about one of Lyta’s group members–a youngster, not more than five years old–learning to make Oldowan tools. It’s enlightening.

What Everyone Ought to Know about PhD Research

You don’t always get what you want. ‘Research’ is the ‘systematic investigation to establish facts’. You don’t know them when you start. You pick them up like breadcrumbs along the path to the Dissertation.

Because mine involves an AI I seem to have lost control over, mankind’s past which is poorly documented by million-year-old artificacts, and a prodigious lack of money, I have often ended up places I had no intent to be, but must some how be connected to my thesis. How do I know they’re connected? Because that’s what Otto does. He takes a collection of facts and finds connections. Here’s an example Otto found and played for me. Why I don’t know. We know man’s past is violent, dangerous. What’s Otto’s point in throwing this into Lyta‘s search for her family?

What I do know is it’s connected to my research, because that’s how I programmed Otto.

Should You Worry About Asteroids?

During Lyta’s time (the Plio-Pleistocene, around 1.8 mya), Nature was more violent than today. Africa’s volcanics were more common and more violent. Mt. Ngorongoro was still alive and belching smoke, as were its many neighbors, possibly due to the growing Great African Rift (the same one we predict will eventually tear the continent in two). Thanks to the triptych of faults (East Africa sits at a rare intersection of three tectonic plates), Earthquakes shook her terrain. The land was cooling, shedding the rainforests her ancestors enjoyed and adopting the grassy savannas still prevalent today.

Moving On

I can’t find Lyta anymore. I log into Otto’s Lyta Scenario, but she doesn’t appear. I’ve plugged her algorithm and her DNA signature into his search functions, but he doesn’t find her. I don’t know what that means. Has she died? Last time I saw her she was walking north, away from her group, with her mate Garv and their son, her adopted son Boah and their ‘dog’ (a loose term for a Plio-Pleisticene version of dogs) Ump.

I miss her. She’s curious, friendly, with a sophisticated style of communication I wouldn’t have dreamt existed when mankind was new. At first I thought Otto intended to answer my research thesis–why did Homo habilis prosper and prior hominids like Australopithecus became extinct. But when I couldn’t get my grant renewed (they wanted me in the field, not talking to an AI), I applied for a DARPA grant. That got sticky and off the track, but into the real world where realpeople were affected by my work.

It’s how I met Zeke. More on him later.

I know Otto could find her. His programming allows me to enter a DNA profile into a space-time location. Maybe he doesn’t want to expose her. Maybe she’s hiding.

I miss her.